Ezekwesili demands more from journalists in Chibok girls’ affair

Former Minister of Education and leader of the ‘Bring back our girls’ group, Dr. Obiageli Ezekwesili, has appealed to the media to do more in the campaign to rescue the 219 girls abducted from the Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, who are still missing.

Mrs Ezekwesili, who led a 16-member delegation of the group to Vintage Press Ltd, Lagos, publishers of The Nation, said it was ironic that after 140 days the girls were discovered missing, “we are not any closer to rescuing them than we were on April 30 when we first came out to demand action on the matter.”

She acknowledged the role of the media in creating awareness about the issue and thanked the management and workers of Vintage Press Ltd for supporting the campaign, by reminding the readers that there are indeed girls missing in Nigeria.

But Dr. Ezekwesili said the time had come for the media to go beyond reporting the issue only when it is convenient, adding that they should take ownership of the campaign.

She said the group had succeeded in creating awareness and compelling the government to acknowledge that the girls are indeed missing, but that there is an urgent need for action by the authorities to search for and rescue the girls, because so far, the impression being given by the government is that it has lost the initiative.

The ex-Minister of Education said it was the responsibility of the media to keep government officials on their toes by remaining focused on the issue to engender public debate.

She said every newspaper should have a terrorism desk because “the kind of thing happening now cannot be handled by a general desk.”

Mrs. Ezekwesili noted that “there are many options open to the government. But as we speak, we don’t know the option the government is taking and time is running out.”

She said the advocacy group is invariably being asked to provide the solution towards cracking the Chibok girls case.

According to her, the buck stops at the table of government and that if Nigerians have to rely on a mere citizens advocacy group to solve the Chibok girls mystery, then there would be no need for government.

The group said journalists have the privilege of meeting and “it is time you engaged them effectively” to get the girls back safely.

It noted that since the ‘Bring back our girls’ campaign started, the number of attacks in the communities around Chibok had escalated.

Dr. Ezekwesili said it is disheartening that despite the awareness created, the Federal Government has not deemed it necessary to take ownership of the crisis and safeguard the area, adding that “this is a cause for worry.”

She said it was also disheartening that almost everyone had moved on, particularly with the outbreak of the Ebola epidemic.

She said ironically, the international community believed that it is a Nigerian problem, which should be tackled by Nigerians.

The leader of the “Bring back our girls” campaigners recalled that the Chibok girls were abducted about midnight on April 14, and that there was a bomb blast on the same day in Abuja.

She recalled how she got involved in the matter. “I had been particularly distressed by the series of bomb blasts in Abuja, not because it was happening in the capital, but because it seemed as if Nigerians had resigned everything to fate and were literarily waiting for the next bomb blast to happen.

“As some of you, who are actively engaged in the social media would attest, I am very much into the social media. The reason being that I use that space to engage on the matter of public policy; one of the things I wanted to do on leaving the World Bank was to teach public policy — a couple of the universities wanted me to do that – but I could not do that because my assignments involved a lot of travels.

“I found it bizarre that the bomb blasts kept going off, but after each one, Nigerians simply moved on.” Dr. Ezekwesili said citizens do have a voice and this ought to be ventilated when things are going wrong.

“It was kind of strange. So, when the Abuja one of April 14 happened, it dawned on me that it is our responsibility as citizens to participate in the conversation of what is going on in the country. On my Twitter account, I tweeted and said, if you are a citizen and have an idea on how to end terrorism, can you tweet at me? And then, people began to tweet at me; it was almost as if they have been waiting for that kind of prompting. People began to tweet at me, and at the end of the day over 500 tweets had been sent my way, detailing their ideas to end terrorism.”

She added that it was not until the next day, by 1pm, that she got the news through the social media that some hundred and something girls had been abducted in a city in Borno State.

“Until the 17th, there was no news from anybody. It was in the evening of the 17th that the military responded that there had been an abduction of girls in Borno, but that they had rescued them. But two days after, it was recanted.”

According to Mrs. Ezekwesili, it was actually on April 23, in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, at a UNESCO event inaugurating Port Harcourt as the World Book Capital that the ‘Bring back our girls campaign’ formally took shape.

At the event, she resolved, with a couple of her associates, to seize the opportunity to ask the audience to stand up for a few minutes for the Chibok girls because for about 10 days then they had been missing and no word on them.

“But, as it turned out, Prof. Wole Soyinka, who was part of the event, made the Chibok girls a sizeable part of his speech. That was how the process that culminated in the ‘Bring back our girls’ campaign started.”

She said there is no iota of truth in the allegation that the campaign is politically-motivated.